Objects of Her Affection
by Searlait
Summary: Written for Elsa Week on Tumblr and from the three-word prompt "code, lamp, tea." The key to Elsa's study has disappeared. A note has been left in its place. And Elsa needs to learn to take a day off...


Elsa had never really considered the idea of taking time off - it was simply not a concept she had ever felt any urge to focus on. Primarily, of course, this was due to the irony of having no free time in which to consider it. There had been no family vacations in her childhood; her powers had seen to that. She had vague memories of holidays, birthdays, and her parents being present and perhaps less preoccupied than usual. But she often suspected many of her memories from so far back were stretched out of shape, twisted by time, and she was strangely scared to ask, as if finding out she was wrong would be another failing of her current self.

Since she had taken the throne, she had allowed the necessities of it to swallow as many hours as she could. Keeping busy meant preoccupation. Going to bed exhausted meant a few blessed hours of deep sleep, free of nightmares, free of tossing and turning with anxiety. She saw no reason not to push herself as hard as she could.

Taking time off never even crossed her mind.

Nor was it the first thing to cross her mind when she reached the door of her study one morning to find it locked, the key mysteriously vanished, and a rolled-up slip of paper around the knob. She raised an eyebrow, removed the paper, and unrolled it.

_Follow the lights_.

Her other eyebrow joined the first. She didn't recognize the penmanship - it was messy, the ink smeared at the tails - but nonetheless smelled Anna all over this.

She tried the door again, just in case: still firmly locked. There would be another key around somewhere. But she already knew she wasn't going to go looking for it. If Anna (it _had_ to be Anna) wanted to play, then Elsa would attempt to play.

But "follow the lights"? Whoever had written it had clearly expected her to understand it, or at least to be able to figure it out. She looked to the opposite wall, out the window - Anna had always had her fascination with the aurora borealis, but there was, of course, no sign of it now; the morning sun was high and bright, but Elsa could think of no way in which she might be expected to follow it.

She turned and looked again at the locked door, pondering. She tapped the slip of paper against her chin.

Lights.

The other lights, the only other lights she could think of were…

She looked down the hall - first to the right, then to the left. And yes - there - almost at the staircase, there was a single lamp burning. She tucked the paper away in her pocket, hurried down the hall, feeling an unfamiliar little frisson of excitement, of intrigue.

There was nothing around the lamp, no not or obvious additional clue, but when she looked up the stairs, there was another burning, several levels up.

She resisted the urge to take the stairs two at a time, or to run up them. It would be rather embarrassing to get caught - and would slow her quest down more than walking, besides.

Around the corner, down the fourth-floor corridor, was another lit lamp. And hanging from the bolt that kept the sconce on the wall - a key with another slip of paper wrapped around it, tied with string.

Elsa removed it almost reverently, unwrapped the paper slowly - she didn't know how long this would last, but if she could perhaps stretch it out a bit, she thought she would. She was - might as well admit it, if only to herself - having fun. This was a mystery to solve, a code to crack - like something out of one of Anna's precious novels. (Which Elsa had perhaps learned to appreciate, too, in recent months - Anna had finally piqued her interest. They had, some of them, proved more intriguing than ridiculous. But secret messages - along with curses, ghosts, and improbable romances - seemed to always feature heavily.)

But this second paper, though larger than the first, had no obvious message on it - or, at least, not a written one. She held it in one hand, the key in the other, and examined it, cocking her head. The string was glued to it, in a cross, the bit that had tied it to the key now hanging down like a tail.

Very strange - but clearly, meant once more to be something she could work out. No clues to be had in the walls around her this time; everything looked just as it always did, just as it should be. The key was from the parlor opening onto the courtyards - she recognized the elaborate knotting on the head. Once, she remembered the excitement of seeing it in Gerda's hand, going to unlock the parlor, the princesses to be released to the wild outdoors for a few hours. Anna had bounced with excitement - and really, it took most of Elsa's self control not to do the same. The parlor itself had been a place to prepare for outdoor pursuits - boots and hats on, supplies gathered: butterfly nets or baskets or…

Elsa looked at the mysterious paper again, a slow smile spreading across her face. Butterfly nets or baskets or _kites_. Sitting on the rug with Anna, cutting and gluing, Anna making up crazy stories out being carried away on the wind. The finished products had never flown very well - top heavy with excessive glue, Elsa now suspected - but she remembered running across the grass, Anna shouting and leaping, both of them giggling like mad.

The parlor, then - still holding key and kite, Elsa went back down the stairs. She allowed herself a little more vigor, a little more open eagerness now - it would surely look more natural going down than up. Besides, she was finding it more difficult to care - too caught up in whatever Anna (couldn't be anyone else) had planned.

She passed one of the serving maids downstairs. The girl hurriedly bowed - but seemed to find nothing untoward in Elsa's behavior. If she noticed the queen was carrying a kite, she kept it to herself.

More surprising than realizing she was having fun - Elsa had to cover her mouth to hide an unexpected wave of mirth. But she also rolled the little kite up inside her palm, a bit self-conscious now. Mid-morning was a quiet time in the castle, and for that, she was glad. She reached the parlor without seeing anyone else.

Inside, the sun was shining bright and full through the French windows, light bringing out the pink-and-green pattern in the rug and sending dust motes dancing through the air. Elsa had rarely come in here since those enchanted childhood days - she didn't do much of the socializing for which rooms like this were intended - but it appeared to have changed hardly at all. She was hit with another wave of emotional memory, not entirely unpleasant.

If little had changed, however, she was fairly sure there had not been a large kite propped up in the corner. This one was nothing like those she and Anna had made - a silk diamond, quartered Arendelle purple-and-green, with real wood crossing it and a long tail of more silk alongside a heavy roll of string.

For the first time, Elsa wondered if Anna was really behind this after all - would Anna know where to go to get a kite?

Well, hopefully she would know soon enough - and clearly, that kite was either the solution or the next clue. She went to it, moved it away from the wall. But again, there was no obvious message - not even a key, this time - and turning it, as had helped unlock the paper one in her mind, offered no answers. She held it up to the window, the silk translucent. No clues, nothing but rich color and richer cloth. She put it back down and looked around the room again, perplexed. This had to be the right room - the key had fit in the door; the kite matched the paper one. So what was she missing?

Well - Elsa had never been particularly good at thinking or responding under the pressure to do so quickly, but methodical problem-solving? That, she felt fairly comfortable in accepting she was quite proficient at. And it was clearly what was called for here.

She crouched to have another look at the kite. Slowly examining it, running her fingers over it, around the edges, down the smooth wood of the spine. Pushed the silk, pulled it gently towards herself in a pinch of cloth. Nothing obviously changed, no message magically appeared.

She resisted the urge to freeze it. Made a face at it instead. But it didn't respond to crossed eyes and a wrinkled nose, either.

Disappointing.

She sat on the floor, had yet another look around the room. She must be missing something obvious.

Paper tied around a key. Key hanging from a lamp. The lamp lit. String around the paper. The string that hid the clue, hid the message, then became the kite string.

So Elsa needed to look not at the kite itself, but at its ball of string? She pulled it towards her from the end attacked to the spine - and sure enough, within the ball at the end, she could feel something hard and heavy.

She was grinning as she unrolled it, the tug unfamiliar against her cheeks.

Inside the string was a toy soldier, paint chipping, the face almost worn away - all she could see. The rest was wrapped in more paper - and it again seemed to be shaped oddly, curves and pockets cut away. She pulled the little soldier out and smoothed the paper against the floor.

A string of paper dolls - four identical girls with round heads and triangle dresses. And - her grin grew wider - they were still, after all these years, just a little bit lopsided.

It had made Anna so mad, when they did that. She didn't have the patience for it, couldn't slow herself, too excited about the finished product to take her time. Then anger, crumpled paper.

_"I can't do it!"_

_"Of course you can. Here."_

And Elsa's hand held Anna's, around scissors much too big and heavy for either of them, and guided it across the paper, up and down and around. Elsa always saw imperfections in her own dolls, too - but Anna never did.

There was no one place they had made paper dolls, though - no obvious locale this would send her to, no key that fit a single door. The toy soldier, then - paper dolls and a toy soldier; there was a connection to be found. She knew the toy soldier - it was one of a set that had once belonged to her father. Like playing outside in the courtyards, playing with the set of tin soldiers had been a special treat in childhood. Her father kept them on the desk in his private study, and only occasionally allowed his daughters to play with them. Elsa had never asked why they were so important to him - now she wished she had. Maybe Anna knew.

But now she thought she understood - the study. Not her own, the one in the private royal quarters, rooms Elsa had felt no urge to take as her own. Another space, like the parlor, made sacred by its only occasionally being open to two curious little girls for whom the forbidden was always an adventure. of course - but why the paper dolls?

Because they had - Elsa hadn't realized she even remembered this - once snuck into the study and decorated it with chains of dolls. She couldn't have been any older than six or seven at the time; Anna had been so young that keeping her from giggling proved impossible. Their father had been working constantly - Elsa still didn't know on what - the stress making him short-tempered, irritable, and they were trying to cheer him up. And as far as Elsa could remember, it had worked - or, at least, he had hugged them and thanked them and promised everything would be better soon.

Elsa stroked her thumb down the little tin soldier. Someone - Anna - had kept them after the king's death.

Elsa was glad that someone had.

So it seemed she would be on to the study next - back upstairs. She wondered briefly how much time she had wasted on this - but found it was nothing that truly concerned her. She was going to see it through to the end, the mystery solved, and time be damned.

The end of the hall on the third floor - she was not particularly surprised to find the door unlocked, nor to find the curtains open inside to let light in. In the study, on the desk, was her old dollhouse.

Like the tin soldiers, Elsa hadn't known her dollhouse hadn't been discarded years ago - she could remember deciding she was too old for it at ten or thereabout, asking that it be removed from her bedroom, but where in the world had it been since? She was starting to wonder if her whole childhood was hidden away in one of the spare rooms.

Speaking of her childhood - the rest of the toy soldiers were inside the house. Each of them had a tiny flower balanced on his head, and they were marching in a line down the stairs, through the living room, and to the "door" painted on the back wall.

Elsa stared at them for a moment, vaguely bemused. Flowers - was she supposed to have a memory of toys and flowers? Soldiers and flowers? _Marching_ and flowers? Nothing came to mind. She looked more closely at the little house, peering into each room for the possibility of additional clues.

It was amazing, how identical it was to her memories - even the furniture had been placed as she'd always had it, arranged just so. There in the kitchen was the tiny painting of apples she'd always found so strangely appealing to look at, and in the attic, she found the crack in the roof where Anna had fallen on it when running in slippery new shoes.

Anna had begged endlessly for Elsa to make up stories using the house and their dolls - and Elsa, when her audience was only her sister, was happy to oblige, borrowing from storybooks and her history lessons to invent new adventures. Anna would sit cross-legged on the floor, enraptured, laughing and gasping and cheering and clapping wildly at the end. Elsa, who had even then dreaded being paraded out before visitors to the castle, had reveled in this attention - in making Anna so happy.

Maybe Anna had taken the dollhouse when Elsa outgrew it. Would she even have remembered Elsa's stories? She had been very young at the time.

If Anna had arranged this, clearly she had known about the dollhouse - and, again, expected Elsa to be able to pick up on her message, follow where it led. So Elsa examined once more the soldiers, the flowers, the rooms. Slowly, methodically, she went through each cube of a room, trying to match it with her rather hazy memories. Nothing had obviously been added - besides the soldiers - and nothing was out of place…

…So something must be missing. Or so she assumed as she gave everything a third careful review. What should be there?

The bedroom on the far left - of course. She should have noticed immediately, considering where the dollhouse was sitting: the little desk beside the bed was gone. She remembered it because it had had a tiny book and inkwell glued on it.

A missing desk, soldiers marching down the stairs, flowers on their heads - this was the strangest clue yet. The code was getting harder to break. Maybe it meant she had almost reached the end. But if she couldn't work out this one, the end was a moot point.

With the kite, the solution had been in the string. There was nothing attached to the dollhouse - just the three walls and a roof. Nothing to either side.

She leaned a little further, just in case. Glanced around the back - and there it was. The desk was standing in, apparently, for a picnic table; miniscule drawings of food had been placed on it. Two little dolls - too bit for the table, but nevermind - were sitting before it. There was a little ceramic goose to one side.

Elsa smiled. This clue, she understood immediately.

She found Anna sitting by the pond in the courtyard - not at a desk, but cross-legged on a blanket. There was a pot, cups, several covered dishes and plates before her.

When she saw Elsa, her face lit up; she grinned and waved. "You did it!"

Elsa gave her a smile that was only a bit exasperated. "You could have warned me."

"What's the fun in that? And you would have said you're too busy."

"I _am_ too busy."

Anna's grin turned mischievous. "Not if I have the key to your study."

"Don't make me freeze you to that blanket."

"You wouldn't. Now come sit down. We're having a tea party."

"A tea party."

"Yep."

Elsa sat.

Maybe she would take an occasional day off after all.

With the right motivation.


End file.
